Apache Arrow 10.0.0 Release

Published 31 Oct 2022
By The Apache Arrow PMC (pmc)

The Apache Arrow team is pleased to announce the 10.0.0 release. This covers over 3 months of development work and includes 473 resolved issues from 100 distinct contributors. See the Install Page to learn how to get the libraries for your platform.

The release notes below are not exhaustive and only expose selected highlights of the release. Many other bugfixes and improvements have been made: we refer you to the complete changelog.

Community

Since the 9.0.0 release, Yanghong Zhong, Remzi Yang, Dan Harris and Bogumił Kamińsk have been invited to be committers. L.C. Hsieh, Weston Pace, Raphael Taylor-Davies, Nicola Crane and Jacob Quinn have joined the Project Management Committee (PMC). Thanks for your contributions and participation in the project!

Columnar Format Notes

Arrow Flight RPC notes

A JDBC driver based on Arrow Flight SQL is now available, courtesy of a code donation from Dremio (ARROW-7744). For more details, see “Expanding Arrow’s Reach with a JDBC Driver for Arrow Flight SQL”. Flight SQL is now supported in Go (ARROW-17326). Protocol definitions for transactions and Substrait plans were added to Flight SQL and are implemented in C++ and Java (ARROW-17688). General “best practices” documentation was added for C++ (ARROW-17407). The C++ implementation now has basic OpenTelemetry integration (ARROW-14958).

C++ notes

C++11 is no longer supported

The Arrow C++ codebase has moved to C++17 as its language compatibility standard (ARROW-17545). This means Arrow C++, including its header files, now requires a C++17-compliant compiler and standard library to be used. Such compilers are widely available on most platforms.

Compatibility backports of C++14 and C++17 features, such as std::string_view or std::variant, have been removed in favor of the standard library version of these APIs (ARROW-17546). This will also make integration of Arrow C++ with other codebases easier.

It is expected that the Arrow C++ codebase will be gradually modernized to use C++17 features in subsequent releases, when the need arises.

Plasma is deprecated

The Plasma module is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

Compute / Acero

Extension types are now supported in hash joins (ARROW-16695).

Datasets

The fragments of a dataset can now be iterated in an asynchronous fashion, using Dataset::GetFragmentsAsync (ARROW-17318).

Filesystems

It is now possible to configure a timeout policy for S3 (ARROW-16521).

Error messages for S3 have been improved to give more context about the error (ARROW-17079).

GetFileInfoGenerator has been optimized for local filesystems, with dedicated options to tune chunking and readahead (ARROW-17306).

JSON

Previously, the JSON reader could only read Decimal fields from JSON strings (i.e. quoted). Now it can also read Decimal fields from JSON numbers as well (ARROW-17847).

Parquet

Before Arrow 3.0.0, data pages version 2 were incorrectly written out, making them unreadable with spec-compliant readers. A compatibility fix has been introduced so that they can still be read with contemporary versions of Arrow (ARROW-17100).

Substrait

The Substrait consumer, which allows Substrait plans to be executed by the Acero execution engine, has received some improvements:

  • Aggregations are now supported (ARROW-15591).

  • Conversion options have been added so that the level of compliance and rountrippability can be chosen when converting between Substrait and Acero representations of a plan (ARROW-16988).

  • Support for many standard Substrait functions has been added (ARROW-15582, ARROW-17523)

Some work has also been done in the reverse direction, to allow Acero execution plans to be serialized as Substrait plans (ARROW-16855).

Other changes

Our CMake package files have been overhauled (ARROW-12175). As a result, namespaced targets are now exported, such as Arrow::arrow_shared. Legacy (non-namespaced) names are still available, for example arrow_shared.

Compiling in release mode now uses -O2, not -O3, by default (ARROW-17436).

The RISC-V architecture is now recongnized at build time (ARROW-17440).

The PyArrow-specific C++ code was moved into the PyArrow source tree (see below, ARROW-16340). The ARROW_PYTHON CMake variable has been deprecated and will be removed in a later release; you should instead enable the necessary components explicitly (ARROW-17868).

Some classes with a Equals method now also support operator== (ARROW-6772). It was decided to only do this when equality is computationally cheap (i.e. not on data collections such as Array, RecordBatch…).

C# notes

Bug Fixes

  • DecimalArray incorrectly appends values very large and very small values. (ARROW-17223)

Gandiva notes

Gandiva has been migrated to use LLVM opaque pointer types, as typed pointers had been deprecated (ARROW-17790).

Go notes

  • A new CI job has been added to run all of the tests with the -asan option using go1.18 (ARROW-17324)
  • Go now passes all integration tests on data types and IPC handling.
  • The Go Arrow and Parquet packages now require go1.17+ (ARROW-17646)

Compute

The compute package that was importable via github.com/apache/arrow/go/v9/arrow/compute is now a separate module which requires go1.18+ (only the compute module, the rest of the packages still work fine under go1.17). (ARROW-17456).

Scalar and Vector kernel infrastructure has been implemented for performing compute operations providing the following functionality:

  • casting Arrow Arrays from one type to another (ARROW-17454)
  • Using Filter and Take functions on an Arrow Array, Record Batch, or Table (ARROW-17669)

Arrow

  • Sparse and Dense Union Arrays have been implemented along with appropriate builders and data type support including in IPC reading and writing. (ARROW-3678, ARROW-17276). This includes scalar types for Dense and Sparse union (ARROW-17390)
  • LargeBinary, LargeString and LargeList arrays have been implemented for handling arrays with 64-bit offsets. This also included fixing a bug so that binary builders are correctly resettable. (ARROW-8226, ARROW-17275)
  • Support for Decimal256 arrays has been implemented (ARROW-10600)
  • Automatic Endianness Conversion for non-native endianness is now an option for IPC streams (ARROW-17219)
  • CSV Writer now supports Timestamp, Date32 and Date64 types (ARROW-17273)
  • CSV Writer now supports custom formatting for boolean values (ARROW-17277)
  • The Go Arrow Library now provides a FlightSQL client and server implementation (ARROW-17326). An example server implementation is provided for a FlightSQL server using SQLite (ARROW-17359)
  • CSV Reader now supports schema type inference via NewInferringReader, along with options for specifying the type of some columns and skipping columns (ARROW-17778)

Parquet

  • RowGroupReader.Column(index int) no longer panics if provided an invalid column index. Instead the signature has been changed to now return (PageReader, error) similar to other methods in the codebase. (ARROW-17274)
  • Bitpacking and other internal required implementations for ppc64le have been added for the Parquet library (ARROW-17372)
  • A bug has been fixed that caused inconsistent row information data from a table written by Athena (ARROW-17453)
  • Fixed a bug that caused panics when writing a Nullable List of Structs (ARROW-17169)
  • Key Value metadata in an Arrow Schema will be propagated to the Parquet file when using pqarrow even when not using StoreSchema (ARROW-17627)
  • A memory leak when using statistics on ByteArray columns has been fixed (ARROW-17573)

Java notes

Many important features, enhancements, and bug fixes are included in this release, as are documentation enhancements, and a large number of improvements to build processes and project infrastructure. Selected highlights can be found below.

New Features and Enhancements

  • JDBC Driver for Arrow Flight SQL (13800)
  • Initial implementation of immutable Table API (14316)
  • Substrait, transaction, cancellation for Flight SQL (13492)
  • Read Arrow IPC, CSV, and ORC files by NativeDatasetFactory (13811, 13973, 14182)
  • Add utility to bind Arrow data to JDBC parameters (13589)

Build enhancements

  • Add Windows build script that produces DLLs (14203)
  • C Data Interface and Dataset libraries can now be built with mvn commands (13881, 13889)

Java notes:

  • Java Plasma JNI bindings have been deprecated (14262)

    JavaScript notes

  • No major changes.

Python notes

Compatibility notes:

  • Some deprecated APIs (deprecated at least since pyarrow 1.0.0) have been removed: the RecordBatchReader.get_next_batch method, DataType.num_children attribute, etc (ARROW-17649).
  • When writing to Arrow IPC file format with pyarrow.dataset.write_dataset using format="ipc" or format="arrow", the default extension for the resulting files is changed to .arrow instead of .feather. You can still use format="feather" to write identical files but using the .feather extension (ARROW-17089).

New features and improvements:

  • Filters in pq.read_table() can be passed as an expression in addition to the legacy list of tuples. For example, filters=pc.field("col") < 4 is equivalent to filters=[("col", "<", 4)] (ARROW-17483).
  • The batch_readahead and fragment_readahead arguments for scanning Datasets are exposed in Python (ARROW-17299).
  • ExtensionArrays can now be created from a storage array through the pa.array(..) constructor (ARROW-17834).
  • Converting ListArrays containing ExtensionArray values to numpy or pandas works by falling back to the storage array (ARROW-17813).
  • The pyarrow.substrait.run_query() function gained a table_provider keyword to run the query against in-memory tables (ARROW-17521).
  • The StructType class gained a field() method to retrieve a child field (ARROW-17131).
  • Casting Tables to a new schema now honors the nullability flag in the target schema (ARROW-16651).
  • Parquet files are now explicitly closed after reading (ARROW-13763).

Further, the Python bindings benefit from improvements in the C++ library (e.g. new compute functions); see the C++ notes above for additional details.

Build notes

The PyArrow-specific C++ code, previously part of Arrow C++ codebase, is now integrated into PyArrow. The tests are run automatically as part of the PyArrow test suite. See: ARROW-16340, ARROW-17122 and PyArrow C++ API notes).

The build process is generally not affected by the change, but the ARROW_PYTHON CMake variable has been deprecated and will be removed in a later release; you should instead enable the necessary components explicitly (ARROW-17868).

R notes

Many improvements to Arrow dplyr queries are added in this version, including:

  • dplyr::across() can be used to apply the same computation across multiple columns;
  • long-running queries can now be cancelled;
  • the data source file name can be added as a column when reading multi-file datasets with add_filename();
  • joins now support extension arrays;
  • and all supported Arrow dplyr functions are now documented on the R documentation site.

For more on what’s in the 10.0.0 R package, see the R changelog.

Ruby and C GLib notes

Ruby

C GLib

Rust notes

The Rust projects have moved to separate repositories outside the main Arrow monorepo. For notes on the latest release of the Rust implementation, see the latest Arrow Rust changelog.